LONDON -- At times, the two men seem to
be conducting an academic discussion, searching for shards
of historical truth in a scholarly, courteous exchange
marked by occasional flashes of humor.

Then there are moments when they wield verbal stilettos,
while maintaining an exterior show of politesse.

"Adolf Hitler never used derogatory terms like
'the Chosen People.' "

"No, he called the Jews parasites and bacilli."

"Yes, yes, it's all fanciful on your part."

British historian David Irving, who has sought to
absolve Hitler from responsibility for the Holocaust, stands
in the witness box in Room 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice
jousting with attorney Richard Rampton.

Irving
is suing
Penguin Books and professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory
University in Atlanta for libel because she has written that
he is a Holocaust denier and a "Hitler partisan" who has
distorted history to try to exonerate the German
dictator.

In her book "Denying the
Holocaust," Lipstadt cites the generally accepted
view that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, vast numbers of
them in extermination camps built for that purpose in
Poland. Most historians believe the decision to carry out a
systematic slaughter of Jews was decided at a conference
held in a villa beside the Wannsee, a Berlin lake, on Jan.
20, 1942. The conference was attended by leading Nazi
officials, but Hitler was not present.

Irving, a gray-haired, broad-shouldered man of 62 who
looks and sounds the part of a mildly querulous academic,
has nothing to lose in this case except his bank
balance.

His
professional reputation already is in tatters, and he has
been barred from Germany and other countries that he says
are essential to his historical research. It is not the
first time Irving has come to court because of his Holocaust
views. At a meeting in Munich, Irving dismissed reports that
the Nazis used gas chambers to kill millions as a
"propaganda story."

Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, and Irving
was charged, found guilty in
May 1992 and heavily fined.

But should he win this libel case, he could walk away
with millions and claim a victory for himself and those who
share his views about the Third Reich.

Even his critics acknowledge
that Irving is the most scholarly of the Holocaust
deniers, and few people have searched the wartime
archives as thoroughly--and benefited as well from the
recollections and diaries of old Nazis whom he
befriended.

His memory is prodigious. Rampton produces relatively
obscure archival documents, and Irving rattles on at length
about minor Nazi bureaucrats mentioned in them, or says with
great confidence this is a document he has never seen.

The trial, which began last week, is expected to continue
for three months and soon will move, briefly, to the site of
the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. Irving has never
been there, but he contends its gas chambers were built by
the Poles after the war as a tourist attraction.

He does not deny the Nazis killed Jews and other
civilians on a large scale. But he does deny it was official
policy and contends Hitler knew nothing about it until
October 1943.

"If the killing had been systematic, it would have been
done with more efficient means," he told the court.

Rampton: "The Germans were acting in a random, haphazard
way?"

Irving: "Yes . . . It was a totally ramshackle operation,
a total lack of system."

While evidence of the systematic nature of the Holocaust
is overwhelming, the basis of Irving's suit is that he has
been falsely accused of denying the Holocaust, so he accepts
the term freely in court.

"I'm not an expert on the Holocaust and don't intend to
become one for the purposes of this trial," he says when
Rampton asks what happened in one of the Nazi camps.

Rampton repeatedly reads documents referring to the
deportation of thousands of Jews to the camps and asks
Irving to accept that any reasonable person would conclude
they were sent there for extermination.

Irving resolutely insists he will not draw inferences
from documents that do not specifically support that
conclusion.

Rampton asserts that Irving has no evidence to contradict
the possibility that Treblinka,
Sobibor and Belzec were built as extermination camps.

"That's a very fair statement," Irving replies.

Throughout, he denies Hitler ordered the Final Solution,
and says that no document has surfaced directly tying Hitler
to the extermination efforts. Nevertheless, reputable
scholars have no doubt that he was informed and gave
ultimate approval for the Holocaust.

Even in 1942, Irving says, Hitler was talking of shipping
the Jews to Madagascar to begin new lives, but the operation
could not be carried out because of the naval war.

In Hitler's "table talks" with his Nazi henchmen, Irving
says, there was never any suggestion Jews should be
systematically killed.

At one point Irving, referring
to the lack of an extermination order from Hitler, tells
Rampton: "I have to remind you of the basic principle of
English law that a man is innocent until he is proved
guilty. Am I right?"

During one break in the proceedings, a woman accosts him
and says her parents were gassed at Auschwitz.

"You may be pleased to know that they almost certainly
died of typhus, as did Anne
Frank," Irving replies.

Rampton sometimes betrays a lack of familiarity with the
historical record. The trial almost certainly will become
more interesting when Irving, who is acting as his own
attorney, cross-examines expert witnesses assembled by the
defense.

The son of a British naval commander who served in both
world wars, Irving has been a Germanophile since his teens.
He dropped out of university and spent a year as a
steelworker in the Ruhr while learning German.

He came to prominence with a book on the bombing of
Dresden and biographies of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
and Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

His most controversial book, "Hitler's
War," was published in 1977 and sought to absolve Hitler
from responsibility for the mass murder of Jews. Irving
offered a cash
reward to anyone who could find a document directly
linking Hitler to the Final Solution.

In the book he said a handwritten note by Heinrich
Himmler, head of the SS, quoted a Hitler order of Nov.
30, 1941, that there was to be "no liquidation" of Jews.
As late as October 1943, he said, Hitler was still
forbidding liquidation of Jews but was disobeyed by the
SS.

Irving contended that, despite his public image, Hitler
was a weak political leader who lost control over those
serving under him.

In 1979 Irving's German publisher apologized for printing
in "Hitler's War" that Anne Frank's diary was a forgery and
paid compensation to her family.

After "Hitler's War," Irving wrote a
biography of the Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels
[published in 1996],
which won praise
from leading British historians.

But from the mid-1980s Irving regularly addressed
enthusiastic neo-Nazi audiences in Austria and Germany.

In 1988 he went to Toronto to testify on behalf of
Ernst Zundel, a Canadian on trial for denying the
Holocaust. He also has attended conferences in the U.S. of
the Institute of Historical Review, a leading forum for
those who deny the Holocaust.

His twin brother, a British civil servant, changed his
name to avoid being identified with him.